Grey Magic. The exhibition combines sculptural interventions with the setting for staging a psychological experiment, a new series of prints, and a film project. The themes are his engagement with fringe science and parapsychological ideas.
Esther Schipper is pleased to present the sixth solo exhibition of Christoph Keller with
the gallery.
Grey Magic
brings together themes from Keller’s ongoing aether project, his engagement
with fringe science and with parapsychological ideas. The exhibition combines sculptural
interventions with the setting for staging a psychological experiment, a new series of
prints, and a film project that will be completed during the course of the exhibition in
the gallery space.
A large-scale mirror installation forms a spiral that unites both rooms of the gallery. Made
from more than 130 individual suspended sections that have slight play, the elements
align and de-align as coherent presence, showing in turn the mirrored surface on one
and the pattern based on Keller’s spiral drawings on their other side. In the second
room, enclosed by part of the spiral, a sensorial experiment,
Mental Radio,
requests
visitors to take part in a psychological test involving telepathic image transference.
In the front room, visible from the outside, is an illuminated work,
Title Tool for an
Imaginary Cinema.
A series of prints, installed in both spaces, combine drawings of
spirals with Keller’s chapter-by-chapter summaries of
Grey Magic,
a 1922 novel by
Salomo Friedlaender/Mynona that gives the exhibition its title.
Keller’s exhibition takes as point of departure the deep entanglement in early twentieth
century Berlin Bohème circles where scientists, philosophers, artists, writers, actors,
and other creative figures exchanged ideas. This period, dating roughly from 1906
to just after World War I, found a particularly enchanting, now somewhat forgotten
expression in Mynona’ book. A volume reprinting part of an essay by Erich Marcus,
whose theory of “eccentric sensation” (and a character based on the philosopher)
features prominently in that book, several historical documents and texts by Keller is
published on occasion and as part of the exhibition.
Press office:
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Esther Schipper GmbH
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